Why Great Supplement and Beauty Brands StallI

I talk to 2–3 founders a week about growth goals. It might sound like a drop in the bucket, but after 12 years, I find myself repeating the same conversations over and over again with brands in the exact same place.

It’s almost always a brand doing “okay.” Not failing, but certainly not on the path to acquisition. Usually teetering somewhere between -3% and 0.1% growth.

It’s true some calls don’t include P&L access, but honestly, a snapshot in GA4 and a quick survey of the team usually tells me everything I need to know. Most brands fall into one of these buckets.

Confusing Action With Momentum

This is incredibly common. So common, honestly, that it frustrates me more than almost anything else below.

The conversation usually opens like this:

 “So you’re sending an average of 30 emails a month… why?” 

or 

“Your team is spending 40+ hours a week on social with no measurable growth… why?”

Or my personal favorite:

“You’re spending $X in advertising… why?”

I don’t expect a detailed answer. If I’m being honest, the question is usually rhetorical.

When I see the same volume of output or the same ad spend month after month — never scaled up, never scaled down, never adjusted meaningfully based on performance — it almost always points to the same thing:

Uninformed, templated marketing strategy.

I understand why templates exist. Founders want systems. Teams want structure. Everyone wants to make sure things are getting out the door.

But somewhere along the way, brands started teaching teams that action equals momentum.

It doesn’t.

A content calendar is not strategy. A fixed ad budget is not strategy. Posting every day is not strategy.

All these ad teams and YouTube marketers selling “plug-and-play growth systems” are lying to you. If marketing could actually be templated, we’d all be rich.

Searching for Growth at the Cost of Profitability

I was in a meeting recently with a brand I’d been working with for a few months.

Profitability was up. Sales were up. Ad spend was way down, which meant traffic was down too.

The brand had previously been paying a small fortune for landing page traffic that generated a lot of visitors, but not significantly more sales. To them, that faux growth felt like business expansion.

And yes, there are absolutely moments — especially in startups — where aggressive growth can make sense strategically.

But you shouldn’t be ten years into business and still struggling to pay yourself.

I always tell founders: the profitable nobody is driving an Aston Martin while the founder of the high burn-rate brand takes the bus.

Vanity growth is still vanity.

Keeping People in Positions They Don’t Have the Skill to Fulfill or Manage

In a startup, the people who stay and grow with you matter.

But that doesn’t mean everyone deserves a C-suite title.

Can people learn to become great marketers? Absolutely.

Can people learn to run a department they’ve never actually worked in before? Usually not.

The biggest brain drain I see in growth-stage brands is directors, managers, and executives who got the role because they started with the company, knew the founder, or stayed long enough to inherit responsibility — not because they actually know how to execute the function.

Head of Growth can’t be someone who has never run ads.
Head of Content can’t be someone without SEO knowledge.
Head of Brand can’t have zero design skill.
Head of Retention has to know how to actually use your ESP.

Whether those things make up their day-to-day workload is irrelevant.

Growth-stage brands cannot afford managers who need to be handheld by the people below them.

Talented leaders make other people’s jobs lower effort, not higher effort.

Right Hire, Wrong Time

The opposite problem can also be true.

Perfect hire. Immaculate resume. Great soft skills. Strong culture fit. Completely wrong timing.

I see this constantly with first-time CMOs.

In fact, if I could patchwork together all the brands and CMOs I’ve met over the years, I honestly don’t think most of them would be at the organizations they currently work for.

Why?

Because brands hire for where they want to be, not where they actually are.

I’m actually a big believer in the fractional CMO movement for this reason.

Most brands in the $250K–$10M range don’t necessarily need “better leadership.” They usually need more hands-on execution with some strategic oversight and lots of feedback loops.

A seasoned executive walking into an organization with no systems, no operational structure, no internal support, and no execution layer underneath them usually just creates frustration on both sides.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the hire.

It’s the stage of the business.

Thinking Growth Can Conceal Poor Product, Messaging, or Audience Fit

This is probably the hardest truth for founders to accept.

Growth marketing cannot permanently conceal weak product-market fit.

You can sometimes brute-force revenue for a while with paid traffic, discounts, influencer spend, aggressive landing pages, or good creative.

But eventually the market tells the truth.

Poor retention, weak repeat purchase rates, low organic advocacy, high CAC, poor conversion rates — these things eventually surface no matter how good the marketing team is.

Some brands don’t need more growth strategy.

They need better positioning.
Better products.
Better offers.
Better understanding of who they’re actually selling to.

Marketing is an amplifier.

And amplification works both ways.